America's Great Internal Conflict:

...The author's sympathies are broad and generous and in harmony with the spirit in which the centennial of the Civil War will probably be observed...

...Nevins enthusiastically portrays the rising tide of liberation and provides a sympathetic picture of the Negro regiments in the Union armies and the idealistic Northerners, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who supplied the early leadership...

...Seeing his men brave heat, thirst, ravines, thickets and murderous artillery fire to attack at Lalvern Hill, Lee had exclaimed: 'No fighting on earth could surpass it.' " From the beginning of 1862 until the eve of the decisive turning point of the war at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the Union cause sustained some severe defeats: the repulse of the overcautious McClellan's fumbling attempts to take Richmond, the reverses at Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville...

...But it could also be said that it never created a machinery adequate to protect all innocent men from injustice, that to the end of the war it too often preferred the swift judgment of military tribunals to civil procedures and that it indulged in too many arbitrary arrests and imprisonments...

...Yet Lincoln, in this and other matters, had a shrewd instinct for not getting ahead of public opinion, generally united on maintaining the Union but divided on the question of slavery...

...Amateurs in American history can scarcely bave a better guide to this phase of the Civil War and experts will be stimulated by the author's convincing analyses and the forcefulness of his judgments...

...At the same time he pays eloquent tribute to Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson as two of the great captains of the war...

...Allan Nevins passes this test with flying colors...

...But the North showed a phoenixlike capacity to rise stronger after defeat and, as the author says, "showed its ability to wage a great conflict with one hand and build up the West with the other"—passing legislation providing for the construction of a trans-continental railway, giving free land to homesteaders and establishing the "land grant" state universities...

...The unforgiving bitterness with which some Union veterans spoke of "the War of the Rebellion" is dead in the North...

...Here are some of the best examples of Nevins' passing judgments on the vast panorama of the Civil War: • "The central fact of the war situation by the spring of 1863 was that the South could win a great battle and emerge permanently weakened, while the North could lose again and again with an Antaeuslike growth in strength...

...Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin Author, "The Russian Revolution," "The Evolution of a Conservative" This is the second volume of a general narrative history of the Civil War, the sixth of a 10-volume project which began with The Ordeal of the Union, dated from 1847, and is intended to carry on to the end of the struggle between the states and the subsequent era of Reconstruction...

...So much has been written about America's one great internal conflict, both in general and in detail, that any newly published work must expect a thorough examination of its credentials...

...in an aptly phrased sentence, the author speaks of "radical Republicans berating the Administration from the rear while Democrats- and ultra-conservative Republicans abused it from the front...

...His writing skill is far above the professorial average...

...In Nevins's opinion the high tide of the Confederate success was reached in the autumn of 1862, when Lee invaded Maryland and was checked at Antietam, and when Bragg entered Kentucky but was forced to retreat after the indecisive battle at Perryville...

...and the smaller the army, the firmer the bonds which knit it together...

...Lincoln did not proceed as fast in this matter as the more zealous Abolitionists would have liked...

...It was the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by Lincoln after the partly successful battle of Antietam, that probably inspired Nevins's subtitle: War Becomes Revolution...

...In the South, which witnessed most of the fighting and suffered almost all the devastation, memories are longer and keener...

...It was wonderful how well Lincoln managed matters on which he thought deeply...

...The longer the war went on, the more territory it affected, the more inevitably the abolition of slavery loomed as a consequence of the South's failure to establish an independent state...

...It could be said for the Administration that it executed nobody, established no police state, and rather than institute a reign of terror, let many petty traitors escape...

...But in all sections of the country the conviction has grown stronger that the "Great American Conflict," as Horace Greeley called it, was no struggle between heroes on one side and villains on the other, but between normal human beings, each with their fair proportion of idealists and ruffians and each fighting for a cause they believed to be right...

...it was also wonderful how completely he refused to think about some matters at all...

...Administration was one of them...

...he is equally at home in the crisp personality sketch, in the description of a great battle and in the brief summary that cuts through detail to get to the essentials of a situation...

...his tribute to the spirit of the outnumbered, poorly supplied Confederates might win a round of applause at a meeting of the Sons or Daughters of the Confederacy: "However few and ill supplied Lee's veterans might be, their heroism never wavered...